Bug Banter Live! Building Pollinator Habitat

One of the most effective ways to contribute to pollinator conservation is to provide the essential components of pollinator habitat. To celebrate Pollinator Week, we invited a panel of Xerces experts to help us answer audience questions in this special Bug Banter Live episode. 

Bernardo Niño is a pollinator conservation specialist with Xerces Food Systems and Living Farms Project in California. Steve Armstead is a pollinator conservation and nature-based climate solutions specialist in Colorado. Emily May is the agricultural conservation lead with the Xerces pesticide reduction program. Kevin Burls is an endangered species conservation biologist in the western United States. 

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Cover photo: Emily May

Thank you for listening! For more information go to xerces.org/bugbanter.

Transcript

Matthew: Welcome to Bug Banter with the Xerces Society where we explore the world of invertebrates and discover how to help these extraordinary animals. If you want to support our work go to xerces.org/donate.

Rachel: Hi, I'm Rachel Dunham calling in today from Sunset Beach, North Carolina.

Matthew: Hi, and I'm Matthew Shepherd from my normal location in Portland, Oregon.

Rachel: Welcome to our second annual Bug Banter Live! to celebrate Pollinator Week. One of the most effective ways to contribute to pollinator conservation is to provide the essential components of pollinator habitat. Pollinator conservation needs everyone, so thank you for listening.

Rachel: We are joined today by a panel of Xerces experts to help us answer your questions. Let's go ahead and introduce our guests. We have Bernardo Niño—I'll have you go first.

Bernardo: I'm Bernardo Niño. I'm based out of Davis, California, and I work on our Living Farms team as a conservation specialist, pollinator habitat specialist, and work exclusively with farmers. And so I work to help them meet their biodiversity goals, help improve habitat on their farms, and support pollinators around California.

Rachel: Thank you, Bernardo. And this is your first time on Bug Banter, so a special welcome to you, and thanks for being here. Steve Armstead, you're up next.

Steve: Hello, everybody. I'm Steve Armstead. I'm a pollinator conservation and nature-based climate solutions specialist working out of Colorado. I work primarily in the front range of Colorado, from kind of Fort Collins in the Denver area. And work on a bunch of different scales from sometimes individuals, to organize other nonprofit organizations, to local communities, cities, to other community groups to figure out ways we can all kind of collaborate to put pollinator habitat on the ground. So I can work on, you know, individual backyards, to community gardens, to a local farm or ranch. So all the different ways that just help promote adding native plants to the ground, and kind of work on a lot of other collective issues. We've got a lot of great people working in pollinator conservation in Colorado, and Xerces and myself are happy to be partnering with them for a lot of big changes here. So, excited to be a part of today.

Rachel: Thank you, Steve. We're happy to have you here and welcome back. Next up is Emily May.

Emily: Hey, everyone. I'm Emily May calling in from the Middlebury, Vermont areas. I am the agricultural conservation lead with the Xerces pesticide program. And I work with farmers, and backyard gardeners, researchers, government agencies, and other conservation professionals, and partners to help us understand pesticide risk to pollinators and other beneficial insects. And support the adoption of in-crop management practices that reduce pesticide use and risk to pollinators, as well as helping to expand high-quality habitat in agricultural areas. But I also work with a lot of backyard gardeners and other groups, locally and around the country on habitat work. So I'm on the eastern side of the country. I've been with Xerces about 10 years. Happy to be here to talk about habitat.

Rachel: Thank you, Emily. 10 years is a long time—congratulations! That's great. Haha. All right. Next up, Kevin Burls.

Kevin: Thanks, Rachel. Thanks, Matthew. My name's Kevin Burls. I am a conservation biologist on our endangered species team. I work out of my home office just south of Reno, Nevada in Western Nevada. And my focus is largely on Western butterflies—that's what I know best. And so most of my work includes working with land managers, and agency staff, or state, or federal agencies across Western states and regions to help identify conservation priorities for butterflies.

Kevin: And I also do a fair bit of advocacy work in the realm of state level advocacy for Nevada, where I live, and at the federal level through our work with Xerces, whether it's an Endangered Species Act, or something like that. And luckily, because I live in a big area with not quite as many people, I get to do some other fun field work. So I have had the chance to do a little bit of bumble bee survey work, and firefly field work, which are other areas of Xerces conservation work, that we don't have staff here today, so I just wanted to mention that those are other program areas that we have.

Rachel: Thank you so much, Kevin. And thank you all so much for joining us today. We are going to jump right into questions.

Matthew: Yeah, no, great. And I just want to echo the thanks to all four of you for being on our panel today. I know listening to your bios and your introductions there, there's such a huge amount of knowledge you have between you. And I'm just looking forward to this conversation. Before we take audience questions, I wanted to just pause and spend a few minutes kind of covering the foundation. I mean, what are the key components of pollinator habitat?

Bernardo: I can talk about one of the things that probably people think of is the food. So it's not just a single source. We work hard—. The habitats that our team designs have a diversity of plants, that also—when you talk about diversity—it's blooming throughout the different seasons of the year, different flower shapes. Because a lot of people think about maybe just honey bees or native bees, but there's a myriad of different pollinators that need support. And also some of the larva need food, too. So there's a diverse range. I would say for most of the habitats I design have an average of 18 species, and have at least three to four blooming throughout the different times of year. Sometimes, depending on the area, can be hard to find, so a lot of early bloomers, or a lot of late bloomers. But that's our goal when we're designing habitat.

Matthew: Great.

Steve: So in addition to food, I think we have to think about kind of the complete lifecycle of our pollinator friends, and thinking about those other qualities they need for kind of a protected space—so shelter. So I'm just looking outside here in the moment and the skies are pretty gray, and I think it could be, you know, thundering and lightning here pretty shortly. And thinking about, “Well, where do those pollinators go when the weather's inclement, or not hospitable to them?” And so in our spaces, certainly thinking about do we have cover for them? So if the weather does get nasty, is there shelter under a shrub, a tree, a grass—a bunch grass—they can take place, you know, and be able to cover themselves with.

Steve: In fact, kind of extends—and certainly here in Colorado, in a lot of areas where the, you know, we have cold winter seasons—they're gonna need a place where they can kind of wait out—whether that's an egg, you know, and sometimes an adult insect, or sometimes a larvae—but can they wait out the cold season until there's food available to them?

Steve: And then kind of additionally, just to what shelters in place is? We gotta think about what shelter is available for the raising of the young? So are there appropriate cavities for any of our cavity-nesting bees to be able to shelter in? So is there, you know, wood around where maybe a beetle hole can become a nest site for a particular bee? Or what about stem-nesting bees? And as we know, most of our bees—over 70%—are nesting in the ground. Is there some space, adequate soil conditions, adequate access to soil? So the tunnel-nesting bees that are living down in the ground can have places to create burrows and be able to lay eggs and, you know, grow the next generation.

Steve: And those same places they may shelter over winter, you know, down around the base of a tuft of grass, or maybe a, you know, in a little bit of a brush pile, are also incredibly important places for potential nesting and overwintering sites. So just kind of think of that whole life cycle of our pollinators, of our insects, and trying to make sure when conditions aren't as favorable, or if they wanna raise the young, are there places that they're gonna be able to do so?

Emily: And then the third element that we often talk about with pollinator habitat is protection from disturbance. And disturbance comes in a lot of different forms. It might mean protection from mowing or tillage. It might mean protection from light pollution. But oftentimes we're talking about protection from pesticide pollution—drift and runoff. So whether you're creating habitat in an urban space or an agricultural space, looking for what's happening in the surrounding area, and how you might better protect the area that you're developing for wildlife habitat from that type of disturbance or pollution. So in a residential space, it might be a neighbor spraying for mosquitoes, or it might be looking at, you know, lawn pesticides used for grubs. And making sure that you're being—you're fully aware of what's happening in that surrounding environment, and how you can better protect your space, and make sure that it's a refuge for those animals so they're able to carry out their full lifecycle in that space.

Rachel: Thank you all so much for providing that background information, and I know we've talked a lot about all these elements on Bug Banter, but it's nice just to have kind of a concise summary—and all things that we're gonna talk more about today. So butterflies are one group of pollinators that have been in the news a lot recently, and yesterday Xerces released a major new report called State of the Butterflies in the United States. And Kevin, you were one of the co-authors on this report. Can you give us a quick overview of the report and state of the butterflies?

Kevin: Yeah, I can try. The State of the Butterflies idea largely comes out of the hopeful fact that we know more about the trends for butterflies than we do about many other groups of insects, because butterflies have a long history of amateur and professional interest, and collection, and observation. And also because they are somewhat easy to identify compared to many other groups of insects. And so there are various data sets collected around the country, and some folks, especially Cheryl Schultz at the University—at Washington State University, and many others coalesced a group called the State of the Butterflies of the U.S. Working Group, and that consisted of nearly two dozen researchers across the country. And that group received support from both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey, and I wanna stress the importance of those federal funding sources in getting this work done. We could not have made this group work together, as it did, without that.

Kevin: And the goal of this group was to gather all of the available butterfly monitoring data sets—that is these multi-year data sets that happen either once a year at the same place, or also they can happen multiple times at the same site through a season. There’re different types of collection protocols—we gathered them all together to analyze butterfly population trends across the contiguous U.S. And this is the largest analysis for butterflies of this kind to date. And what we found was unfortunately familiar to what other studies of insect abundance and species richness have found across various areas, which is a decline in butterfly abundance at approximately 1.3% per year. That's summed across everything across the U.S., so obviously there's a lot of geographic variation in there. And 1.3% per year may not sound like much, but that is approximately 22%—a decline in total abundance from the year 2000 to 2020.

Kevin: And one of our co-authors, I thought, on the paper, put it really poignantly recently, which was just that: we have just gone through graduation season for high school students, and those students are seeing approximately 20% fewer butterflies than they did when they were born. Which is a heartbreaking fact, but I think puts that number into perspective.

Kevin: So, in addition to summarizing some of this sad information, what we have tried to do is make it useful for folks to take action on, and provide a roadmap for butterflies into the future, where we see more butterflies than we do today—and reverse some of these trends. So, one of the things that happened in the analysis was we broke this down by Fish and Wildlife Service region—that's just a nice geographic breakdown. Whether you're in the Northeast, or the Southwest, or the Pacific Northwest, you can look to your region and see which butterflies are in steepest decline. So we've tried to make that useful for state and regional agency staff, non-profit land managers, the general public, and so on.

Kevin: And then we also have a whole set of actions that we hope to guide people into the future with that are for folks who are on public lands, or private lands, folks who are in agencies, working lands, including farmlands and others. And, we are really excited by the fact that—this is the sort of publication, if I may say, that before I started at Xerces I always looked to Xerces to. And I hope that this becomes that, where this is something that the general public, and agencies, and other technical experts can refer to again and again over the coming five or so years, to really get a handle on the sort of actions that can help restore butterfly habitat and populations. Thanks for giving me the chance to talk about that—we really appreciate it.

Rachel: Of course. Thank you for co-authoring it. I know it was an effort, so thank you. And I think everything we're talking about today will help butterflies, whether it's reducing pesticides, or providing habitat. So I'm glad that we brought this up. And for our Bug Banter listeners, we will have our first July episode coming out will actually be with Scott Black, our executive director, and Cheryl Schultz on the report itself. And so if you wanna learn more, that would be a great podcast to listen in to. And again, that will be coming out that first Tuesday in July.

Matthew: Before we went live we did ask listeners to submit questions ahead of time. We had only one from Jackie in Georgia, so thank you, Jackie. Jackie's question is one that I'm sure many people have probably wondered and it is: how can we counteract the chemicals our neighbors spray in their yards to combat mosquitoes? And Jackie added the observation that in recent years that insect and pollinator populations have plummeted and they think it's due to this. So I think maybe Emily, you might be the best place to respond to that?

Emily: Sure thing. And thank you, Jackie, for submitting that question—I know that's something that I think about a lot. Unlike agricultural pesticide use, which does have some record keeping, there is no record keeping for residential pesticide use. So we have—. It's very difficult for us to track the increase in use of pesticides for mosquitoes and ticks. But it seems like it has been increasing annually, just anecdotally. So in terms of what you can do to counteract what your neighbors are doing, the best thing you can do is to keep planting pesticide-free plants in your yard. Keep trying to make your yard a refuge space for the pollinators in your neighborhood. And two things you can do, if you know your neighbor is spraying. One is to try and site your pollinator habitat as far away from those known spray zones as possible. And if you can, think about using a drift barrier of some kind between your yard and your neighbor's yard. So something like planting conifers—just like you would as a visual screen, or a screen against, you know, your neighbor's floodlight for light pollution—you can also use that to help catch some of that, you know, sort of fogging application.

Emily: If your plants, if you know, have been sprayed by a neighboring pesticide application, that's when we would ask that you try to remove those flowers and mow them down. Consider maybe netting the plants to prevent poisoning, to prevent other pollinators from coming in and being exposed to those pesticides. And then of course, as possible, talk to your neighbors, right? That can be tricky because everyone has different reasons, often health-related, or nuisance-related, for making those applications. But you know, one place to start, if you don't wanna talk directly to your neighbor, is thinking about finding your like-minded people in the community to start a community education campaign around this.

Emily: Mosquito control is most effective at the neighborhood level, or at the landscape level, rather than at the yard level. So education campaigns that help people take actions to reduce that mosquito pressure at the neighborhood level can be really effective. You know, removing standing water, making sure after a rain event you've gone out and turned over your kids' toys, or your wheelbarrows, or other things that are collecting water. And we have resources on this, on how to help your community create an effective mosquito management plan. But find those like-minded people and engage new people in the movement to build better habitat and take smaller steps on mosquito management than the yard by yard treatments.

Rachel: Thank you, Emily.

Matthew: Thank you.

Rachel: Alright, we have so many great questions coming in into our Q&A so I am going to jump right in. Pat is wondering what your thoughts are about gardens on sidewalks closer to busy streets.

Steve: I'll go ahead and start this, or jump in a little bit. And I'm thinking maybe part of the question here is just the concern with the proximity to a street and vehicles passing by, and the potential threats or impact to pollinators that are being attracted to this site where there's, you know, again, fast moving vehicles potentially nearby. And I think—. Couple aspects here. One is, I think anywhere we can put habitat, we should. You know, fundamentally, [it] is getting to the point of providing food, is probably the key thing. And helping in any way we can to support pollinators, and providing food sources for them, and shelter is really important.

Steve: And there could be situations that there could be some loss, and we wanna be careful and thoughtful about that. But providing a resource is fundamentally the most important. And sometimes those spaces are great spaces to be able to do that. You know, it might be also a site you think about maybe providing more of your shelter resources than perhaps the floral resources, so think about rocks and so forth. So over winter, you know, if you have a winter situation, that could be a place for supporting that.

Steve: And I think the other piece I would say is: it may be even then more important to find other spaces nearby you can enhance, or really provide more floral resources. So that strip by the street can be some of the habitat you're providing, but you're also really trying to provide maybe a backyard space, or side yard space, or, you know, helping work with neighbors for a community plot that can be your primary space that you're providing the floral resources. So, I think, you know, don't let any good opportunity go to waste, would be a fundamental. But it is worthwhile to consider that roadways can have some impact. But I think, again, it's offset by creating habitat to begin with.

Matthew: The next question comes from Annie, and they say, “Hello. I'm a big wasp fan, but I know that most people don't feel the same way. Do you have any tips for encouraging wasps to nest in places where they're less likely to have encounters with people, but still able to do their pollination and pest control services?”

Emily: Well, Annie, thanks for being a wasp fan. I'm also a wasp fan, even though I'm slightly allergic to them. I'm glad that you brought them into the conversation. Wasps are really valuable for their pest control services, and, occasionally, their pollination. But they do often, you know, make people nervous. There’re conflicts with people that often come down to where they're choosing to nest, right? Because paper wasps are something that we're probably all familiar with. They all like building under eaves and overhangs that are sheltered from the weather. They're dry, they're protected, they're out of the way—that's the perfect kind of real estate for a paper wasp. So if you're wanting to discourage them around high-traffic areas, you know, the few tricks that I use are to check those eaves early in the season, and then gently try and remove some of those nests as they're just starting to develop.

Emily: And then thinking about whether you have any alternative structures where you would be okay with them nesting. So whether that's like a detached garage where you're not worried about high traffic, or, you know, some kind of trellis, or a bird house, or something like that where you would be okay with them nesting underneath it. And then one thing that I have been seeing people use effectively more recently, is there's these decoy nests that can—you can hang up and discourage new nests from forming in that location. So if there's a spot where you see them every year, you can try hanging up a decoy nest and see if that might discourage them from forming a nest in that location the next year.

Kevin: I was just gonna add, I—the decoy nest makes me realize that, of course, I grew up in Ohio and they're so obvious, you know what you are dealing with—but I just wanted to add a more general note that, of course, many wasp species are not the yellow jacket type that hang from big social nests. Many yellow and black scary looking wasps are solitary—each one, each mother taking care of her own young—and they are much less likely to sting because of that feature in and of itself. Much less, many of them being super beneficial for pest management, which, I'm sure as a wasp fan, the person who asked the question is already okay with. But, you know, there are things like mud daubers, and various other—potter wasps—that will make nests and can feel intimidating in some ways, but with each mom taking care of her own young, the biology is very different and they are very, very beneficial.

Emily: Thanks for adding that. I totally forgot to mention that I actually had grass-carrying wasps nesting in my doorway, and I decided to let them be—they found a way between the weather stripping and the door. And because it was a solitary mom, I rarely, very rarely actually saw her, and it didn't seem to interfere with my ability to go in and out.

Bernardo: So, on our farms, we're integrating some sensors to take some data for us to monitor the habitat. And they have this large solar panel, which is basically like an eave, and so on almost all the sensors monitoring habitat, we've created habitat for the wasps. So it's kind of a funny quirk. And there's a bird's nest on one of them, so they're both monitoring and providing.

Rachel: That's awesome. Thank you, Bernardo. And that's a perfect segue to a question that I was probably gonna direct to you. Kelly is wondering—they have a family who runs a very large corporate farm for corn and soy. What sort of large-scale solutions can they recommend for reducing harm to pollinators while still achieving their goals?

Bernardo: So I think Emily will definitely wanna chime in on this one because I think, from the protection aspect, I think the—just overall pesticide usage. Also, when you're integrating pollinator habitat into farms, one of the biggest first questions I ask farmers is what they're using, because that will inform where we're able to put habitat. So if you don't have any habitat on your farm and you're looking to put a new place, that is a great way to create a large-scale solution. There’re pollinator meadows, hedge rows, but all of that comes at a cost with—. I'm not putting, especially a permanent habitat, that is let's say 2,000 feet long, right down the middle of a farm that's using neonics, because it's—even while there may be some benefits, I think the overall cost of that would be not worth putting it in. So, on farms for me, like ditches, fence lines—we generally try and stay 40 feet away from crops. Again, it depends on the type of crop and your pesticide regimen. But I'll let Emily chime in on the pesticide aspect.

Emily: Sure thing, yeah. So first, I think, I love that answer. I feel like one of the things that first jumps out for me—my dad's family is a corn and soybean family from Illinois—and protecting fence lines and tree rows—tree lines and fence rows—over time, as the impulse is to kind of push those out to get bigger and bigger fields, keeping those as habitat is really important for, you know, wildlife being able to stay in those spaces over time. In terms of pesticide use in corn and soybean. So the big one in corn is seed treatments. So both corn and soybean can be treated with insecticides and fungicides on their seeds. Corn, it's almost 100% of corn is treated with insecticides on the seeds. And those are used regardless of whether there is [an] actual pest that they're being used for.

Emily: So I would really encourage your family to be looking into whether there is an alternative seed available. Because those seeds really can be harmful to neighboring pollinators. They are systemic, they can—most of them don't go into the target plant. They end up in the soil, and they end up washing into plants in the surrounding environment and waterways where they can affect aquatic invertebrates. So, increasingly research is pointing to the lack of economic benefit of these seed treatments. So those untreated seeds, or fungicide-only seeds are available by special order from seed companies. So looking into whether those are available for the types of varieties that your family's growing, and whether they can implement more of an integrated pest management approach to seed pests. So looking in the field, scouting for whether those pests are actually present and causing harm to the crop.

Emily: Same for—in soybeans, the primary pest is the soybean aphid. And so those get sprayed mid-season, which is right like prime monarch time, prime pollinator time—they're getting sprayed, often aerially. So, using integrated pest management, getting out and scouting to make sure you really need that chemical before it goes on is really important for protecting pollinators and their habitat and those systems. But thanks for asking that question—really appreciate it.

Matthew: These are all great questions. The next one I wanted to ask—in fact, I wanted to combine two questions here, because we have two questions related to making meadows. The first question is from Nancy, and I think is probably an easier one. “What is the best way to get started with a pollinator meadow? Do you have to start with bare earth?” And the one from Laura is more that Laura's been having problems with, in particular, oxeye daisy, in her area of—their area of Washington state. So, let's start with what's the best way of creating a pollinator meadow?

Steve: I love that you said you thought this was the easier one, Matthew. Haha. I think it's always a challenge. We all might have slightly different takes and experiences around this. And I think it's a great question because it sounds so easy to say, you know, “Let's put in a meadow.” And, “Do we need to start with bare ground?” Which, you know, there could be different ways to approach it. And the answer I would say is: yes, in some degrees. But actually, more important than just the bare ground is what was there previous, and what's underneath the ground in terms of the seed bank, and what is going to kind of continue to potentially be growing in that area, whether in the site you're prepping, or in the adjacent area? And how is that going to impact your goals of establishing new plants, you know, whether by seed or putting in plant plugs, to help create a meadow?

Steve: So I think, you know, I think we always say is: all your efforts should first of all focus on site prep to make sure you start with the most successful base template. The most successful space that you're gonna try to alleviate some of the other more aggressive weed pressures that you could be facing, because they're gonna want to outcompete, or maybe grow faster, or maybe shade out any sort of plant you want to establish, whether that's through seed or even through plugs. So taking your time to kind of prep a site, you know, to try to remove existing and especially unwanted vegetation—any of those kind of really aggressive weeds, or certainly any sort of obnoxious. So whether that's, you know, through a process where you're trying to remove the existing plants through solarization—putting plastic down and heating the ground up. Whether you put down cardboard and mulches to try to smother the vegetation underneath. Sometimes that works in certain areas well with turf grass, if you're trying to kind of remove an existing, you know, a grass situation. And there are certainly other techniques and depending upon where you are.

Steve: But I think trying to remove the pressure of other plants kind of moving in more quickly than you can establish your seeds or your plants is kind of a key starting place to take advantage of. And then also choosing some plants carefully for that area that you know are gonna do well, given your site, your conditions, the, you know, amount of shade or moisture, water you have available. And think about, to some degree, getting some—a head start to some plants, you might actually add in some annuals. They're gonna kind of gonna move into that space quickly. That also will help hold the soil and maybe protect that site a little bit for some perennial plants that you'll wanna have and be established over time. Thinking about making sure you have the diversity of—the same things that kind of Bernardo was saying at the very beginning—when you think about floral resources and making sure there's some diversity of plants to have in there. But site prep is incredibly important.

Steve: There at times you can use cover crops. Here in Colorado, that's becomes pretty important because, you know, we have high wind conditions. It can be pretty dry, and it takes a while to establish, you know, a site and remove the existing vegetation. One way you can help kind of create a stable situation is to put in a short-living cover crop that at least allows the soil to remain intact while your seeds are overwintering, and being prepared to start in the next spring. So, you know, there are some different ways. You don't have to necessarily have bare ground, but, you know, it has to be something that's managed for where you are and some of the threats that are there. But I'm sure we each have different takes on even that piece.

Kevin: I can jump in for just one other thing, is that—.

Steve: Sure.

Kevin: —depending on your environment—. Just adding on a specific example to what Steve said, and that was an awesome answer. Thanks for covering all that, Steve. That was really great. When I have been dealing with some meadow situations where you already have a mixed environment, and maybe some of those plants are what you want and other ones are not, there are certain techniques that you can use to add in species over time. And one of those—just as a general term that you can look up later—is simply called overseeding. And that's essentially just in the fall, mowing the grass short and then seeding on top, and watering it in. There are variations on that theme, but there are techniques where you can enhance what is already existing if what you have is not so aggressive that it's just gonna block everything out.

Kevin: And then I had—. I just can only empathize with the oxeye daisies. I don't have oxeye daisies at my property, but I have other really aggressive weeds that despite my best efforts—. So I can offer empathy for sure. And I saw that you mentioned solarization in the question, and I personally do feel like that's one of the better methods for attacking a semi-large solid area. And so one thing I might suggest is it seems like maybe you solarized for one season, and I would totally just extend that to two seasons. There are many seeds that will just take multiple years of that heat and isolation to break down. So a second year of that is definitely in order. And I wouldn't—. If you felt like the solarization did its job, I would not feel bad trying it just one more time. I know looking at plastic for two years is not a fun feeling. So again, empathy—I have solarizing going on in my yard, too.

Kevin: And then the only other thing is just that, you know, a lot of science and natural history is careful observation. And you have mentioned here that you have a couple of natives peeking through, and I would capitalize on that in all instances. Meadow succession is a real thing. Where I'm at, you know, if I start with what I want for perennial native—Great Basin plants—I often won't get everything. One of the things that a seed person taught me around here was to start with things like California poppies. That's the sort of—. Just to that point of like getting things established quickly, sometimes you have to take advantage of what will work, and then try and add in over time. So take advantage of what is successful, I think, when you're able to.

Matthew: Yeah, no, thank you for drilling down onto the oxeye daisies, as well. I was also wondering whether—. I also, I mean, where we live in western Oregon, there's a lot of oxeye daisies. A lot of the kind of natural areas in parks are long grass and oxeye daisies. And so they're obviously a very strong growing, very aggressive plant. And I was also wondering whether it may be that one year of solarization and one year of weed control is just not enough for them.

Kevin: I have definitely had that happen. In my own experience, I had things come up the second season. After full success in the first year, they just come back up. You just gotta hack it out, unfortunately.

Steve: I would just echo, and so strongly support, that sometimes that second year is critical. And I'm thinking, too, about some of these deep-rooted perennial weeds. I fight bindweed constantly. And, you know, in fact, too, I've learned if I keep the plastic on a little too long and late in the season, and if I’m not careful with it, it can actually create a greenhouse effect and actually create some growth. So, you know, just—it's be patient, it's constant learning and tweaking. But I think, you know, if you don't catch it all the first year, try again. And you're—again, going back to the beginning—it's best to start with as best prepped site as you can. Because it's hard to undo a site, where you're kind of starting back from square one, which is okay—it happens. But you know, you want to try to avoid that and then maximize your efforts.

Emily: I was gonna add one thing which is, because I'm in the Northeast—solarization, typically, it's very effective in places that get really hot—but it's not as effective—using clear plastic to solarize is not as effective up here where we're in a cold climate. So what is more effective, if you're looking for a site prep method in the Northeast region would be, occultation, which is just using black plastic as opposed to clear plastic for prepping a site. But definitely watching out for that greenhouse effect—we get that, as well, with the use of plastic. And the other thing to look out for with using any kind of plastic for prepping a site is to make sure your edges are kept down, and to make sure you don't have holes coming into that plastic, because that can then really knock down its efficacy, if you've got kind of the cooler air coming in. You want it to really heat up under that plastic and make sure it's knocking out the plants.

Matthew: That's a—.

Emily: But it does—.

Matthew: I was going to say that's a whole new word. What is it, occultation?

Emily: Occultation. But I think knowing what plants are in the area you're prepping before you prep it can be important in knowing whether you wanna do one year or two years. There’re certain really problematic weeds that you are gonna wanna give adequate time for prep before you try and replace them with natives, which can be a little dinky sometimes when they're coming up. They're not as good at competing, depending on what you're putting in there. But things like plantains, spotted knapweed—I'm thinking Midwest, Northeast plants. Hoary alyssum. Mugwort, mugwort, mugwort. If you have mugwort you need more than one year of site prep. Haha. Bindweed. All of those things. If you don't know what you're looking at, you know, you can ask Master Gardeners, you can ask for Extension—someone in your local area to help you figure out what's in that site.

Rachel: Definitely. Alright, well I'm gonna ask this next question, moving kind of into overwintering habitat—which is great. So this question is: “What is the balance between leaving stems for insects to overwinter in, and clearing foliage to maintain the health, safety, and strong growth of plants and natural spaces, like with controlled burns?”

Kevin: I can start an answer. I have had my own intimate experience with wildfire, so I, again, empathize with wanting to balance safety. And so the first thing is—. And I should clarify and disclaim that nobody on this call is a wildfire expert, so obviously, if you have real questions dealing with wildfire safety, you should ask folks at Extensions, or other locations that have that specialty. But there are specific zones that are designed—the concept is to have a zone that's right around your house that's very, very clean from debris, and then you work your way out. And the vegetation structure changes with how far away you are from your home, along with landscape elements like the slope of your house—the slope of your yard. So with that in mind, you should, in many cases, have the ability to keep the area around your house clean, and ready, and safe. Also safe from pests and things, right? If you're worried about vegetation buildup around your foundations being a pest issue. You know, that area can be kept clear while still having vegetation and some remaining dry, dead vegetation in other places further out. And also maintaining the spacing between those clumps of vegetation is another key aspect of wildfire control near yards—is kind of the spacing of all that. So those are just two things to start off with.

Steve: Well, just gonna add that, you know, I know that fire is an important tool [some]times, for a lot of our natural landscapes, or for helping to kind of provide the health of our grasslands. And so sometimes that is an important thing. And I think part of that question, too, is how much do you wanna make sure you're using certain tools like fire, which can certainly remove a lot of potential nesting resources, but also be healthy, and kind of regenerating. But also make sure you're containing, or continuing to have, you know, nesting resources in an area. So some of our kind of key recommendations—that kind of even lines up with mowing—is to make sure you're not treating an entire area. So that you want to, maybe at most, burn a third of an area, or sometimes mow a third of an area so that there's some opportunity for that treatment to have its intended impact, but you also have adjacent areas that the nesting resources, or the other food sources are available. So I think that's kind of that general—that tools are important and we have a place for them, but we also want to be careful. And the extent we utilize those tools in a space.

Matthew: Yeah, thank you. I had one that I'm partly intrigued by—I think it's a great question. “If one had a choice between stewarding wild habitat or restoring disturbed habitat, what would be worth the labor to manage? For example, I want to buy land and I could either buy a defunct farm or a relatively untouched raw land.”

Bernardo: I'll touch a little bit on restoring farm space, and this will kinda loop into the folks' answers about starting a pollinator meadow. So a lot of times farms have a ton of weed seed bank in the soil, so I personally have a hard time doing seeding projects in California just because of the weed pressure. So it depends on where you are. And maybe if it's a, you know, small farm that has a lot of native plants, then maybe that's better than a wild area. But I just know from my experience, like we have to do container planting if we're not doing like cover cropping, because the seeding project we've done just struggle, and they take a lot of work, and they just end up getting out competed, even with like agricultural-level site prep—still makes it really hard, so. But that's my experience.

Kevin: I would echo that where I have dabbled—dipped my toes in the river of restoration—when I have planted, or done some seeding in a defunct alfalfa field, they, for example, dump—it ends up being very nitrogen-rich compared to the surrounding Great Basin soil for us, and the weeds just go bananas. It can be very difficult. The only other thing I would say is just looking at it as a job—it's always easier to keep existing employees than it is to hire new ones. So if you have existing habitat, you know, that is habitat today—that's a bird in the hand. So, you know, that's one of my thoughts.

Emily: I think my initial thought is protecting what's still wild is often more effective for biodiversity. But I would also ask: what does it mean to be untouched? Because I think a lot of land has a disturbance history of some kind. And so wanting to take a walk through there and see what is ecologically valuable in that space already before you decide which one's gonna actually take more restoration effort. The other thing is, yeah, just how much does your back already hurt, and how much do you wanna invest in that piece of land over time, in terms of effort? Because restoration takes a whole lot of work depending on what you're trying to do. So yeah, those are the things that that come to mind. It can be really meaningful to restore a disturbed site, and it can take a lot of effort.

Steve: I would just chime in—yeah, my first thought is whenever we have a space that has less disturbance, that has a real greater importance for us to try to keep it in that condition. I think we've been talking, again, a lot about, you know, what's kind of above the ground, but thinking about kind of the intricacies in our soil, and our soil life. That when that soil system gets disturbed, you know, it's something we don't—we're still learning a lot about. So how do we actually get to the techniques where we can help build restoration just with the soil, let alone above ground? So protecting the systems we have that have some kind of intactness to them from their natural is, I think, incredibly important. And it's incredibly meaningful to take areas that have been disturbed, as we've all been saying, and try to help them back to a more natural condition, but it takes a lot of work.

Rachel: Thank you all so much—those were great answers. So this next question is one I'm gonna ask, because we get this a lot in our webinars, and people really struggle with how to communicate the importance of reducing insecticides. So Patricia—they have a community hosting an open house for its community mosquito abatement program. What can they bring to justify their advocacy against insecticides, such as supporting mosquito dunks, etc., other things? If they can't provide justification, it will not be taken seriously. I think a lot of people can probably relate to this question, even talking about neighbors and mosquito spray. Anyone have any advice for Patricia?

Emily: I would say, please do reach out to our team pesticides@xerces.org. We can help find those resources for you to help you with your communication with your mosquito abatement district. It's gonna depend on what are they spraying, how are they spraying it? Are they implementing scouting before they're applying an insecticide? And what kind of insecticide are they're applying, right? So we have resources on both some of the harms of mosquito adulticides, as well as how to craft those ecologically sound mosquito management plans with your community.

Emily: One thing I just saw the other day that I'm hoping will propagate out into more communities is from Doug Tallamy's book. He has been advocating for this alternative mosquito management solution, which is the mosquito dunk buckets. Which is basically these buckets that you fill up with water and grass clippings, and then attract in gravid female mosquitoes to lay their eggs, and trap them with a larvicide inside those buckets. So I have been seeing more communities holding events to help people build those traps for themselves, and then put them out through the community. You know, we're not necessarily organizing those at Xerces, but I do think that that is a solution at a community level that is gonna be much less harmful than the widespread spraying of mosquito adulticides. So something to look into, and please do reach out to our team because we can help find you those resources to share with your community.

Matthew: I'm gonna move on with another question here—completely different topic. It's one reason I've been enjoying the questions because we can just jump around all over the place. “I've always wondered where do butterflies sleep at night?”

Kevin: Well, I haven't watched any of them, but most butterflies find a sheltered spot near where their nectar plants, and/or their cater—their prospective caterpillar host plants are going to be. There are some butterflies that fly around a long distance, but even still, they stick pretty close to the plants they need. And so those places at night might look like the crevice, like a crevice in a rock, like a big crack in a rock. Or in the underside of leaf litter, or nestled into the crook of a tree root in the ground, or even nestled in a deep tree bark crevice. And oftentimes, even less hidden than that, because, of course, many butterflies are smaller than we expect at first. And so some of my favorite butterflies are the blues, which are oftentimes no bigger than a nickel or a quarter at best, and those butterflies can hang out on the underside of a leaf overnight without much issue at all. So those sorts of places are very typical. Monarchs, especially when they are migrating, I have seen them do a little more of a roosting-like behavior, where they'll hang out in a tree at night, even by themselves, even far away from over wintering grounds when they're in that migratory pattern. But that's less usual, in my opinion.

Rachel: I'm gonna go to this next one because it's one we haven't really gotten before. I've done a lot of webinars on this topic, and so I'm interested to see what advice we have here. So this person's trying to convince their employer to remove flying insect traps from an outdoor eating area that attracts a lot of bees and wasps. There's a resistance due to concerns about people, mostly customers, getting stung. Can anything other than those traps be used to discourage the presence of bees and wasps? They suggested friendly signage about the benefits of bees and wasps, and encouraging people to be calm around these insects to avoid stings, but the concern remains.

Bernardo: Yeah, I think—that's a tough one—I think one of the talking points is generally the bees and wasps that you encounter, if they're social, they're the foragers, and so they're probably not in the mood to be defensive. And then a lot of them are probably solitary and just gonna do their thing. If this is like a honey bee and like, again, more of a social wasp interaction, the sugary drinks can definitely be a problem. You could put an alternative sugar syrup source for them away from where everybody's eating. But yeah, short of—. If they're out they’re looking for food, and your food is—potentially could be their food, then you would give them other food someplace else. And then just encourage people that they're probably not gonna bother you, and don't swat at them, and I think that's—that would be my best advice.

Emily: I think that's great. Haha. Yep, you can have a sign that says, you know, bees and wasps are part of this environment. Staying calm and not swatting at them helps to prevent stings. And thank you for sharing the space with wasps. And also those traps can bring more wasps into that environment than they are catching. So I like the idea of putting something that attracts the wasps farther away from your eating area than having those traps right nearby.  

Steve: I would just also add—some of these spaces we may have trash cans nearby, or people aren't as clean when—after they've had their lunch, and so forth. So making sure there's not other food we're leaving behind. You know, the trash can—maybe make sure that's placed a little further away, because when we're not there, those are still food remnants for many of these wasp species that are foraging for that. So just thinking about what we're leaving behind, and how other sources—kind of what you were saying, Emily—that we're doing, that we're attracting them in that space, that we want to try to, you know, not have those attractants there.

Matthew: I'll just share an anecdote. One of our Ambassador outreach volunteers saw a wasp trap. It was one of those sticky traps in someone's front yard, and it was covered with longhorn bees. It must have had dozens of longhorn bees on that one trap in someone's front yard. So these traps don't only affect the target so, it's a little sad.

Rachel: I think we have time for one more question. Jeanette is wondering—they compost practically all of their leaves from trees—street trees and yard trees—on site and have tons of bugs in the soil, which is awesome. They also have many of their garden paths lined with bark chips and growing mushrooms, and many of their neighbors are doing the same. So their question is: “Are there any studies on the impact of landscaping by composting leaves in place, or replacing parts of lawn with bark chips on pollinators, or are they not impacted by those habitats?”

Kevin: I think that woodchips lining a garden path is probably no problem at all. I think in my area—or, what I should say is in arid parts of the U.S. where people are concerned about water conservation—sometimes you will see people go, what I would consider slightly overboard, and make the whole front yard wood chips, so that they don't have to do grass. And what we do know about that is that that's not solitary bees’ favorite nesting habitat. Three quarters of solitary bees nest in the ground. They need bare ground that's got some substance to it. And so having to weave their way through two or three inches of wood chips is a non-ideal situation for them. I don't think little bits of wood chips here and there is gonna be a problem at all.

Kevin: And then for composting leaves in place. I think, I think if they're mulched up, I don't know that they'll provide the same level of habitat that that whole leaves are going to. That's my general opinion on that. Emily may have other thoughts, too, or others.

Emily: I was just gonna point to some research that was undertaken at the University of Maryland on leaf litter removal and different options for leaf litter removal. And they basically found that if you are leaving some in place, some percentage of your leaves in place, you are going to get butterfly emergence and moth emergence from your yard. But you don't wanna compost too thickly or you're gonna reduce the amount of emergence that you get from that set of leaf litter. So if you can think thinner—if you're taking that leaf litter, raking it off and putting it maybe around your garden beds, you're still gonna have lepidoptera emergence from that leaf litter. But once you start to put it into a compost pile, some of that heat is going to compost down your overwintering butterflies and moths. So try and keep some for the butterflies.

Rachel: I wanna thank you all so much for being here. Thank you to our audience for your wonderful questions. Bernardo, Steve, Kevin, Emily, thank you so much for your time today. And happy Pollinator Week, everyone! Thank you, Matthew, for being here. And we hope to have you all back on our next episode and our next Bug Banter Live.

Matthew: Yeah, no, thank you, everybody. And thank you to everybody who sat and listened.

Kevin: Thanks, Rachel. Thanks, Matthew.

Rachel: Bug Banter is brought to you by the Xerces Society, a donor-based nonprofit that is working to protect insects and other invertebrates—the life that sustains us.

Rachel: If you’re already a donor, thank you so much. If you want to support our work go to xerces.org/donate. For information about this podcast and for show notes go to xerces.org/bugbanter.